


Jesus is my barista

by wired



Category: Christian Bible (New Testament), Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Jesus is all up in my id, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Puns & Word Play, bastard operator from hell - Freeform, faith - Freeform, going straight to hell, homemade fig newtons, sacrilicious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 23:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2043750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wired/pseuds/wired
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coffee shop AUs get to the heart of characters. This is a story about Hephaestus, the bastard operator from Hades, and his super awesome barista.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jesus is my barista

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to lthomas987, sigridellis, and xatharine for ideas and cheerleading.

In the mornings, I can shuffle in to Higher Ground and he has my americano ready to pour into my travel mug.

"Morning, Heph."  
"Mmmf"

And then he leaves me alone, which is why I come here and not Idle Hands, across the street. To be fair, Idle Hands is sometimes my afternoon cake stop, because the devils' food cake is as good as you'd expect, but I don't like talking in the morning.

Jesus is never pushy about initiating conversations. So I huddle in the corner with my crutch blocking the power outlet and one blessed ethernet port, and I scan through my alerts and logs so I know what people are going to freak about when I walk in the door. 

Whatever the problem is, it always come down to connection problems. Offer them a million protocols, and they still get tangled up in the actual packet sending. At least at this job never has storage space problems. At our rate of increase, we consume cloud resources at a horrifying rate, but it's not my job to provision them, that's done automatically. Big steel, big fluffy clouds, whatever, as long as I never have to rack something over my head while trying to balance on one leg and a gimpy prop.

The americano is always perfect, of course, and I can hear him talking to the other customers as they come in. He doles out orange juice and B12 to the hungover Dionysus. Kali clicks in on stilettos, her hair electric and radiant, full of ideas on how to strip down a company to its constituent parts and set them up as competition for each other. Kali always makes me exhausted and nervous, but Jesus grins at her and says something kinda snarky about trees that don't bear fruit and what happens to them. 

It's a quiet morning for me, now that I have the overnight alerts sorted. There's a stand-up in a couple hours, but for now I can dig into this problem that's been on my back burner. It's a thorny little mess of scripting that allows people to choose their configuration wizard so they are always working in the interface that's comfortable for them. Some people don't believe they're actually making any progress unless there's at least a little suffering going on. Some people want the bare minimum of interface. And some people would like to pretend they aren't making a choice, it's all on rails. Fucking rails people. It's hard to obfuscate all the choices and pretend like it isn't all 80% the same code on the back end.

He's in a lull, so he's making knockoff fig newtons and singing along to a song on the shop soundtrack. "just a stranger on the the bus, trying to make his way home". I think he picks the music with an eye toward sacrilege. He's chill, but when it comes right down to it, he's pretty much a shit-stirrer. It's like a trickster god in the form of grace and forgiveness. The trickster keeps seeping out around the saintliness. Thank goodness, or I wouldn't be able to hang out here. Saintliness gives me hives.

He slides four cookies and a glass of milk onto my table without ever making me fear for my laptop and walks away with a bounce in his ponytail. I'd wonder if he knows I have a crush on him, but of course he does. The only thing worse than predestination is omniscience. Fuckers. But he pretends he doesn't know, and I think whatever I want. He can know, but those of us operating in sidereal time appreciate that he waits for us to get around to whatever we want when we want it. In the meantime, I enjoy the bouncy retreat and then try to get my head back in the game. Mmm, cookies.

A woman comes in and perches on one of the counter stools and starts laying it all out for him, how she wants to be able to take care of herself, but it keeps failing, and she's so lonely and empty. I would lose interest as soon as I realized it was something you can't hit with a code-hammer, but he nods and listens and listens and nods. He is 100% paying attention to her and on her side, and he holds her hand and gives her tissues when she cries. I try to feel grouchy about the muffled weeping disturbing my train of thought, but really, I can't help but watch all smitten as he comforts her and gives her a big hug. She leaves all cheered up and saying she'll be back, and she probably will. When the door tinkles behind her, he catches me still watching and throws me a wink that can only be described as "saucy".

"Come for the coffee, stay for the salvation."

"She didn't even get any coffee! That's a dumb saying, dude."

"She thirsted, and she got the living water."

I try REALLY HARD not to think about the living water I could coax out if I knelt between his feet and....  
PERLY GATES SCRIPTING. Yup. Thinking about perl code always kills an incoming Wrong Thought about His divine thighs. Almost always. Mostly. Kinda. Dammit.

I slam my laptop closed and mutter about needing to get to work and yank the power cord out of the wall so hard I almost take the wall socket with me. By the time I have everything stowed, he's elbow deep cleaning out the bean grinder storage, so we don't have to look at each other when I say goodbye and flee into the glorious daylight.

I'll be back tomorrow. He knows it, I know it. I wish I could figure out how to talk to him, but prayer and supplication seems like a bad start to a relationship. Until I get a handle on it, I guess I'll go buy coffee and he'll politely pretend I'm not lusting in my heart. It works. We have time. We have all the time there is.


End file.
